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No, you are obligated to provide the source code to anyone who you give the binaries to. You have no obligation to contribute to the project. Of course obligations don't necessarily get honoured. Want to take a guess at how many companies use GPL software or libraries in proprietary products and services?

You rephrased and claimed contradiction.
There is NO DIFFERENCE between obligated to provide source and contribute back. I never suggested that you need to participate directly in the project in order to contribute. VERY narrow minded you need to be to make that association.

As for "honoring" the GPL.. of course some companies will rip off GPL code. The point though, is that when they're big enough that it matters, they can't afford to do that and get called out for it.

Please don't compare bleeding edge workstation/hacker/tester distros to enterprise linux servers. Your example of multi-year stability with security patches is nothing unique to BSD. I have production servers running uptimes of multiple-years as well, and not just dinky private office fileservers, rather high volume web and database servers that have all of russia and china pounding on my ports thousands of times daily.

So were your servers not affected by the recent leap second or did your enterprise distro push out the fix in time?

Please don't compare bleeding edge workstation/hacker/tester distros to enterprise linux servers. Your example of multi-year stability with security patches is nothing unique to BSD. I have production servers running uptimes of multiple-years as well, and not just dinky private office fileservers, rather high volume web and database servers that have all of russia and china pounding on my ports thousands of times daily.

I didn't claim that maintaining stability branches and security updates didn't exist in other places. The point was that there's a single upstream vendor which maintains kernel and userland on all branches. Linux distros try to archive the same, but they're more like a middleman and stuff can easily fall through the cracks with the amount of patches going on in the Linux word.

Note that I didn't post this to bash Linux, this was directed at the BSD bashers

However, by saying FreeBSD is pathetic I don't think he was talking about stability. Linux and Unix like systems are the most stable. The problem with BSD is it's always behind, because of the lack of manpower. The features that are comming to FreeBSD 10 are already present in Linux.

Will this shut up people who complain about PA and say it's a layer? What's more funny Windows and OS X are also using something like this, so if everyone is using such layer now, people should shut up, right?

They probably added audio server, because Linux fans are complaining about lack of "futures" (bloat) on FreeBSD. Audio server is useless layer, unless they put all audio stuff in user space.

However, by saying FreeBSD is pathetic I don't think he was talking about stability. Linux and Unix like systems are the most stable. The problem with BSD is it's always behind, because of the lack of manpower. The features that are comming to FreeBSD 10 are already present in Linux.

Will this shut up people who complain about PA and say it's a layer? What's more funny Windows and OS X are also using something like this, so if everyone is using such layer now, people should shut up, right?

What for? To take a look at meaningless and unfair comparison (KDE vs Unity)?

Well, Linux certainly owns netcraft if you mean quantity. However, what I argued was that since january 2011, FreeBSD has ranked better than Linux in 10 out of 18 months. I argue that this proves that FreeBSD is at least as stable as Linux, since the tests obviously puts the most extreme demands on virtually every subsystem of the kernel. Moreover, since december 2010, FreeBSD wins 18 months while Linux 13 months. So, if this is not an argument showing the "rock solid" aspect of FreeBSD, and that it is even more stable than Linux, it should count as an argument showing that Linux is not more stable than FreeBSD, that is, FreeBSD is AT LEAST as stable as Linux.
About manpower... I agree the obvious advantages of this. However, with all the atention (and resources) spent on Linux by the most powerful companies, how can you measure the actual freedom of Linux? Maybe not having so much attention can be a nice thing.

BSD servers can be EXTREMELY stable, no question. As for using clang, well maybe it will catch more errors and make FreeBSD more stable for the speed trade off. *BSD to Linux is like Linux is to Windows, you trade stability for features and binary blobs along the way, you have to decide where the trade off pays off best for you.